Following the horrific injuries sustained by a girl who drank liquid nitrogen, has
the trend for molecular mixology gone too far?

One moment Gaby Scanlon was out with her friends celebrating her 18th birthday in a wine bar in Lancaster city centre, showing off the watch she’d been given. The next, she was in Lancaster Royal Infirmary, having her stomach removed.

There are plenty of sixth-formers who wake up feeling the worse for wear after celebrating this milestone, but Gaby’s horrendous incident was not because she had drunk too much. It was because of what she had drunk: liquid nitrogen.

The police and the bar owners are still trying to work out exactly what happened, and there is no suggestion that anyone has broken any laws. However, Gaby’s accident has thrown the spotlight on the increasingly sophisticated world of cocktail bars. The era of simple piña coladas and vodka tonics has been replaced by molecular mixology, where foams, sprays, jellies and smoking drinks have become all the rage. Martini glasses and highballs are now passé – shots are drunk out of test tubes, gin and elderflower tonics served out of steaming tea pots.

“It really took off about two or three years ago, and the dry-ice effect is exciting,” says Tatiana Mercer, who runs a bar blog, BarChick. “It’s brought the sense of theatre into bars, in the way that Heston Blumenthal did with restaurants. But I had no idea it was potentially dangerous.”

Gaby’s night out was at a pretty basic bar in the university town. Famed for its generous portions of nachos, even this hang-out has taken up the trend of liquid nitrogen, a chemical many of us will remember from childhood science lessons – being handled by a diffident teacher wearing goggles.

-210C and -196C; it starts to evaporate the moment it comes into contact with room temperature air, creating a dramatic dry-ice effect. It is completely harmless as a gas – most of the air we breathe is made up of nitrogen – but as a liquid it has the power to freeze objects in a matter of seconds. Touching the liquid can give you severe cryogenic, or cold, burns.

Reputable barmen are appalled by the incident, but also baffled: most of them do not use liquid nitrogen as an ingredient, they use it as a tool to freeze things very rapidly and to a very low temperature.

Tristan Stephenson is a director of Fluid Movement, which helped pioneer molecular mixology – cocktails with a bit of wizardry. At the company’s bar, Purl, they used to make a “nitrogen martini”, which involves cooling the gin down to -40c by mixing it in a cocktail shaker that is sitting in a bucket of liquid nitrogen.

“It is very, very, cold and slightly spicy on the tongue – but perfectly safe,” Stephenson says. He also uses the liquid nitrogen to freeze a twist of lime solid. He then pours a small amount of the liquid nitrogen on top to “garnish” the drink. It immediately starts to evaporate, enveloping the glass in an ice-cold steam. “But you need to wait for it to stop steaming before you touch it,” he explains.

Though the chemical is not expensive, the vessels in which it is stored, called dewars, are very pricey because, if the liquid nitrogen is kept in a standard flask, it would likely explode. He can get through 50 litres in a week, which would cost £2,000 to store – a significant outlay for a small bar.

Some barmen refuse to touch the chemical because of the risks of storing and handling it. A German chef three years ago lost his hand after a canister of liquid nitrogen exploded.

But other chefs have successfully used the chemical to great effect. At Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, customers are served eggs and bacon ice cream that has been “cooked” in a saucepan at their table. He has always maintained that it is a tool, no different from any piece of kitchen equipment, which needs to be used by trained chefs.

Doug Thornton, the chief executive of the British Compressed Gases Association, is shocked by the trend for television chefs and bars to use chemicals designed for large-scale industrial production. “I saw it being used on the television the other day to make ice cream, and I just thought: 'Why are they being so stupid?’ Celebrity chefs and barmen need to stop portraying liquid nitrogen as a good thing to use. It is not. It is stupid. You have to be very highly trained to handle it.

“And anything that encourages the public to track it down is terrible news.”

There is nothing new about keen amateur chefs trying out the latest kitchen gadgetry. In the late 1990s, home cooks frequently scorched their fingers after they attempted to copy Gary Rhodes’s blow-torched crème brûlée. Back in the late 1950s, Which? magazine had frequently to warn their readers about unsafe “automatic electric toasters”, the latest expensive piece of kit to hit the shops.

Of course, you can’t just pop to Lakeland to buy liquid nitrogen. But there are specialist companies that advertise on the website of Caterer and Hotelkeeper, the industry magazine. Barmen admit that they can buy it with no proof that they are experienced handlers of the chemical.

Michael Stringer is a bar consultant – in itself a sign of how far the cocktail industry has progressed. He recommends that people use the cheaper, less hazardous, solid carbon dioxide, which can be supplied in cocktail twizzlers that have little holes out of which the gas escapes, creating the same dry ice effect, but without the risk of anyone drinking it directly.

Last night the Food Standards Agency issued a warning about the dangers of liquid nitrogen, indicating that bars would be checked to ensure they know what they are handling. The smoking cocktail could soon be extinguished.